The World's Worst Beer?

In the run-up to the World Cup in Germany this week, I noticed something in the news about the official beer for the event being Budweiser. Moreover, it’s not even the original Budweiser from what was Czechoslovakia, but that insipid, watery excuse for a beer made by Anheuser-Busch of St Louis. Apparently, this American mega-corporation have ponied up $47 million as one of the official sponsors, giving them the right to make Bud the only beer on sale within a 500 metre radius surrounding the official stadiums. As a sap to the Czech brewery of Budweiser Budvar, Anheuser-Busch are only allowed to advertise their product as ‘Bud’.

The German reaction has been predictable.

‘I wouldn't wash my car with it,’ said Bavarian Beer Club member Ottmar Riesing.
‘We have a duty to public welfare and must not poison visitors to World Cup venues,’ said Franz Maget, leader of the Bavarian Social Democratic Party, commenting on what some Germans have called ‘beer censorship’.
The same man called Bud ‘the world's worst beer’ and he could be right, even though by his country’s standards it is _not_ beer at all, but something else.
Advertising Bud as ‘beer’ contravenes the German version of the Trade Descriptions Act. The German purity law only considers a drink to be beer if it is brewed from malt, hops and water and Bud is looked down upon by those familiar with Germany's storied tradition of beer because it is produced with rice included in its ingredients.
However, FIFA are standing firm, which gives the verity to what Bob Dylan penned all those years ago--‘Money doesn’t talk--it swears’.

All this reminds me of a dispute in Britain over thirty years ago concerning ‘Real Ale’ versus ‘keg beer’. A consumer association called CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale’ was set up in 1971 in protest at the brewing industry producing pasteurised beer served chilled from kegs pressurised with CO2 or nitrogen. Aggressive merger and acquisition tactics meant that many small breweries producing traditional cask ales were disappearing. I prefer cask over keg anyday and I was and am generally in favour of the activities of CAMRA

It must be said though, that keg beers have improved immeasurably over the years. Moreover, there is nothing worse than having your ear bent by an over-enthusiastic CAMRA auto-didact, while you are just trying to enjoy a quiet pint.
In the sixties one of the bete noirs of CAMRA was an abominable beer called Watney’s Red Barrel, which is no longer in production. Its demise was surely helped by a Monty Python sketch broadcast in November 1972 featuring a dialogue between Mr Bounder of Adventure Travel (Michael Palin) and a tourist called Mr Smoke-Too-Much (Eric Idle). It was enough to put anyone off for life!



… Bounder: Anyway about the holiday

Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've been on package tours several times you see, and I decided that this was for me

Bounder: Ah good

Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what's the point of being treated like sheep. What's the pointof going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."

Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I quite agree...

Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

Bounder: (beginning to get fed up) Yes, yes now......

Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Pow ell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

Bounder: Will you be quiet please

Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'.

Bounder: Shut up

Tourist: Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets

Bounder: Shut up!

Tourist: where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion.......

Bounder: Shut up your bloody gob....

Tourist: crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...